Update on teaching: I will teach HBV101F Software Maintenance in Spring 2018 and TÖL503M Distributed Systems will be very likely taught in fall 2017 by an external teacher.

I will not be teaching in autumn 2017, hence the course HBV101F Software Maintenance and TÖL503M/TÖL102F Distributed Systems will not be taught by me. Due to lack of sufficient financing of public universities by the Icelandic government, it is currently not possible to pay someone to teach these courses. If state financing for universities improves, this might change!

Students who would have needed to take the course HBV101F Software Maintenance (which is mandatory in the Software Engineering study line) can get an exemption and take another course instead.

Some background on public university financing: in Iceland, the state spends a little bit less than 1.3 million krona (at the current exchange rate: 10 660 EUR) per student and year (which is not only for salaries of all kind of staff, but also for infrastructure such as buildings, or infrastructure to do research) whereas the average in Iceland's Nordic neighbour states is more than 2.2 million krona (at the current exchange rate: 18 000 EUR) per student and year. As a result, I am not allowed to work overtime to teach beyond my teaching obligation as I did in the past. (Well, I could work overtime, but I will not get paid and then, the state would rely on stupid professors working for free and lower the funding even further). While typically permanent overtime is more expensive than hiring additional staff, a professor has 48% teaching obligation, 12% administration and 40% research obligation. Hence, hiring a new professor just in order to add more teaching capacity, pays not off: only 48% of this salary would go into teaching. Hence, permanent working overtime of professors to ensure teaching (not talking about research -- of course, a good university needs to do both) makes in fact economically sense and is thus often the norm. Reducing funding of universities to such an extent that the only way for the universities to safe money is reducing overtime payments, therefore leads to problems with respect to teaching offerings and teaching quality! Of course, best would be instead of working and paying overtime, to employ further professors, because these ensure both teaching and research which are both pillars of universities!

If you think the underfinancing of public universities by the Icelandic government is a shame, then you have not read how University administration deals with the current underfunding of the fiscal year 2017:

Our Faculty of Industrial Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science (Icelandic: IVT) is part of the School of Engineering and Natural Sciences (SENS or Icelandic: VoN). For determining how the budget is distributing to the individual faculties, the University of Iceland applies a distribution model ("deililíkan", see the Icelandic description in Deililíkan Háskóla Íslands -- Skýrsla til rektors -- Tillögur um breytingar og úrbætur and MPA thesis Árangursstjórnun í háskólum á Íslandi, or for English texts, section 1.5.9. of Evaluation System for Public Higher Education Institutions Description and Self‐Review -- December 9, 2016 and section 3.4 of DOI:10.13177/irpa.a.2016.12.1.9, however the formula in the latter contains some typos) that involves an allocation formula that takes (among others) the teaching (in terms of number of students) and research activities (in terms of publications and acquired funding) into account. While this is calculated individually for each faculty, the money goes not directly to each faculty, but instead SENS receives the money for all its faculties. However, this money is not forwarded by the head of SENS to the faculties according to the distribution model! Instead we (who safe money) get less and others (who do not safe money) get more (in fact, they get our money):

While our IVT faculty is, together with a smaller one, the only faculty of SENS that manages to operate within the budget of the distribution model (we even use less because we have not as much permanent positions staffed as we should -- see above), the other faculties do not, but exceed their budget. Because our IVT faculty is so good in reducing costs (for example due to do teaching as cheaper overtime -- see above), our money is taken away and given instead to all the faculties that do not manage to stay within their budget. In fact, we are even requested to save even more (see above: no overtime payments) while the other faculties are allowed to continue spending more than the budget distributed to them according to the distribution model allows.

TL;DR: we are forced by the University administration to cut down our budget far beyond our allocation ("earned" by us due to our performance indicators used as input for the distribution model) in a way that we sacrifice our teaching offering and quality -- only to feed the other faculties that need more money than according to their allocation (they either have to improve their performance indicators, convince everyone to change the distribution model, or safe money). Due to a lack of transparency, we cannot even check whether the others at least try to safe money (e.g. while we cancel courses with less than 10 participants, we do not know whether they do this at all): we were only given by the dean of SENS their overall budget need but no motivation for their budget.

I leave it up to you to decide whether this makes SENSe or not.

P.S.: In January 2017, we were not paid any overtime: this overtime payment refers to overtime worked in 2016, i.e. the word is (we were never officially informed about the reason -- see lack of transparency above) that the dean of SENS refuses to pay work the we did back in 2016 (and even earlier in some cases) even though it was not forbidden to work overtime in these days, but overtime was rather ordered. This is a clear violation of the collective wage agreements (so also the University administration relies on stupid professors working for free). At least, I get my normal fixed salary paid -- in contrast to a part time teacher who did not get paid at all unless he threatened to go on hunger strike. Maybe we should do the same...

P.P.S.: Notably, the university mastered the severe financial crash 2008 in Iceland without the above problems. It needed a new government that in times of a flourishing economy of 2016/2017 underfinances the university. That government was elected (over the one that cleaned up the mess after the 2008 crisis and allowed indebted house owners to write off debts that were higher than 110% of their property's value) because it promised even more write-offs of housing debts (which is one of the reason why that government has no money left to finance the universities). It just came into light that those that benefited most from these write offs where those with high-income that took high loans -- in contrast to those that wisely did avoid high debts or even made no debts at all. Does this remind you of the above faculties that do not stay within their budget and thus get even more money and our faculty that wisely stays withing its budget...?